Tag : T-Mobile’s

16

November 2010

T-Mobile’s has come out with their first Android tablet, the Samsung Galaxy Tab. It is a good piece of hardware, but it doesn’t have enough great apps to be compelling. It’s hard to compete with other units like it for a variety of reasons, I feel not having enough apps is the largest one. The iPad makes it difficult to set itself aside from the others. Sprint also has its own version that actually came out two weeks ago, but just last week had the chance to play with this version. Both are part of the same line of device and make up the first true tablet competitors to the iPad. I will say this, this unit is sort of a new breed, because unlike the iPad, they’re truly small and light enough to be used on the go. In any case, they’re well built and worth watching, though they need more custom apps to be truly useful. The Samsung Galaxy Tab is about $399-$599. After playing with the unit I feel that the speed is great, nice camera that takes good pictures, and overall great performance.

This unit has 16GB of internal storage plus a memory card slot and the T-Mobile’s 3G network is very fast and reliable which is key. The Galaxy Tab can’t hit T-Mobile’s maximum HSPA+ speeds of 7Mbps, but its got a healthy 2Mbps on the Galaxy Tab’s HSPA 7.2 modem using the Ookla speed test app. The device also has 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, and it had no trouble connecting to our WPA2 protected network. There’s no Wi-Fi sharing mode, though, but there’s a USB tethering mode. Looking over the web reports it is documented that some people have achieved 7.0 hours of video playback time, with screen brightness set to automatic. The battery life for the galaxy is shorter than the iPad’s battery life, but Apple’s tablet is larger, thus the larger battery. The Galaxy Tab model runs on Android 2.2. But here’s the biggest problem with the Tab: there is currently one good app for Android tablets. It is the new Wall Street Journal app, and it’s just beautiful, with a ‘virtual newspaper’ look and feel that is far easier and more fun to read than, say, the New York Times’ or the AP’s list format. It is reported that more apps are coming, but who really knows when that is happening.